A Closer Look at How Visual Marketing Works and How It has Changed with Time

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Visual marketing can be dynamic in its definition, but at its core, the discipline can be defined as the study of relationships that exist in between visual perception, human psychology, and business. It is important to keep in mind that these relationships and their effects on business were always there, long before visual marketing officially became a subject for marketing students and professionals to study.

Although the core concept has remained unchanged for the most part, the tools, trends, mediums, and processes themselves have gone through a lot of changes. Let’s now take a closer look at visual marketing, the many changes it has gone through, and where it stands today.

Is Visual Marketing and Visual Communication the Same Idea?

Although they are related to the same concept at large, there is one major difference between visual communication and visual marketing. The following should help us distinguish between the two better.

• Visual marketing is a general, broad term that encompasses every aspect of the discipline
• Visual communication concerns itself primarily with application of the discipline in a real-world, business scenario

It would be proper to call visual marketing the subject, and visual communication the implementation of knowledge and skills acquired while studying that subject.

Changes and Trends in Visual Marketing

As the Emerson College blog rightly points out, marketers today cannot just rely on older marketing techniques such as one-on-one meetings and phone calls anymore because marketing has changed immensely in the last decade or so. The modern marketer must have skills and education that are in tune with the concurrent times if they hope to succeed in this new world of hyper-competitive marketing. The same applies to all forms of marketing, of which visual marketing is an integral part.

In order to understand those changes, all one needs to do is look at how the most successful corporations have implemented their own visual marketing plans and how they communicate their brand messages to their respective audiences. Trends are, in effect, changes to the former standard, which means that by looking through successful trends adopted by the most successful marketers, we can visualize what those changes have been and how they can be adopted in our own marketing ventures with success.

Video is Still Leading, But the Parameters Have Changed

The fact that video remains on top of every marketer’s list as the most successful visual medium shouldn’t come as a surprise. Video has multiple aspects going for it, which naturally makes it superior to all other forms of visual marketing content in most campaigns.

• A single minute of video can deliver more coherent information than text or images can within the same time frame
• Not all, but most videos also engage the customer’s sense of hearing simultaneously
• Humans find it easier to understand/explain messages, products, ideas, concepts, services, etc. via video content, and much faster at that

This brings us to our main point, which involves taking a brief look at what changes have been made recently, to keep visual marketing via video content on top of the chart.

• Unlike how it was previously, TV ads are now secondary to social media ads
• Videos have become smaller to accommodate the shorter average attention span of most target audience groups
• The focus is now on making the first 8 – 12 seconds of any video promotion more appealing; most viewers will leave within the first 5 – 10 seconds otherwise
• Value and relevance are extremely important to the newer generations; the content must both provide value and be relatable to what it is promoting

Transient Media is Succeeding

Transient or ephemeral media content is anything that brings an additional sense of exclusivity or rarity with it to grab the attention of target customers by being only available for a short time. Limited time offers are not a novel concept because the idea of promoting “sales” has been there forever. However, visual marketing has incorporated the same on a virtual level only recently. To explain how it works, the following points should prove to be useful.

• A suitably appealing media content is created to promote a limited time offer
• Using the 24-hour only “story” formats on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat, the media is promoted to the specific target audience groups
• A combination of the transient media content and the offer appeals to the customer’s affinity for exclusivity

Interactive Ads are Exceptionally Successful

Smartphones are now the primary device for most users across every generation to access the internet and everything that is on it. As a result, in-app ads had gained a lot of success earlier. However, they were turning into nuisances and the perception of the user was changing.

• They began to identify the companies utilizing in-app ads to promote themselves as obstacles, rather than tapping on them
• Interactive ads changed that perception to a degree by engaging the user, instead of making them sit through the whole promotional piece
•  The visual and interactive experience together is creating a much higher rate of turnover than non-interactive, in-app ads now

The main reason why visual marketing works so well in the first place is related closely with human psychology, or to be more precise, the specific parts of human psychology that are responsible for making purchase decisions. It has been proven that human beings (except the visually impaired) often make some of the most important purchase decisions of their lives based on visual perception, which means that we have a natural affinity towards visually pleasing and satisfying experiences. Visual communication is about delivering or communicating that experience to the customers, by understanding what the target audience views as visually appealing with respect to the genre in question. Our sense of aesthetics differs to an extent from person to person, as well as in its relevance to the scenario in question. This makes creating a successful visual marketing plan and then communicating the same to the potential customers with high success rates, not an easy job any means. It requires proper education, training, understanding, dedication, research, and experience to perfect, but when a marketer does get it right, legendary visual marketing campaigns are created as a result of all that effort.